Traditions are vital for retaining cultural and national identity. This is the reason why we cling onto them despite being archaic and obsolete. In Roderick Cabrido’s Tuos, two women are both entangled in the constricting confinements of their culture. They are in the crossfire between modernity and tradition.

The society defines women as mothers. Surely, nothing is wrong with choosing to raise your children, setting aside your own career, and staying inside the house to do the “dirty” works. But, when you choose otherwise, you are seen as useless, incompetent, and un-womanly. This 2014 film talks on how being a wife and a mother are more often than not prescribed roles. It is a story on how a woman courageously left the situation she thinks she does not deserve. Her tale is told on a backdrop of the dying shoe industry of Marikina.

By Heinrich Domingo

When you fear and feel powerless, create an art work they say. Shout your advocacy through artistry, through beauty, through cinema. But what if, you cannot comprehend art. What is artistic expression to you if you are hungry in the middle of the night, if you are landless all your life, if you have to watch your sick children die? They are the Sama D’laut group, the subject of Director Luisito Ignacio’s film Laut. Seen on the big screen is the reeking condition of a displaced community and their constant fight to continue living.